Balance cost with empathy to get maximum return on your benefits

For most businesses, benefits are a major outgoing, comprising around 20% of total payroll costs. Through our actuarial services, Mercer Marsh Benefits can help you get maximum value from this spend and keep unnecessary costs down.

Our actuarial team can help you design and price the most effective benefit plan to suit your demographic and risk profile.

Manage costs to boost benefits value

Balancing cost and empathy in financial employee benefits packages can improve return on investment, reduce risk, and boost employee satisfaction and retention.

Maximizing value from your benefit spend

Recent global social, economic and political shifts have brought the importance of employer healthcare provision into clearer focus than ever. Consequently, employee benefits are taking an increasingly central role in the employee value proposition.

Companies with operations spread across multiple geographies can find that – unless managed properly – costs and complexity associated with financing and administering benefits can escalate. 

Mercer March Benefits can offer additional services relating to both administration (Global Benefits Management) and financing of benefits (multinational pooling arrangements, global insurance programs and captive arrangements) to help reduce costs and risk.

Innovations and developments arising from an increased focus on sustainability and inclusion, growing need for workplace well-being solutions and a desire for equity across workforces – along with increasing medical costs, means that benefit budgets are struggling to keep pace.

Robust cost containment strategies, focused benefit spend, and efficient financing methods are more important than ever to ensure companies get the most value and impact from their employee benefit budgets.

How Mercer Marsh Benefits financial and actuarial services can help

We work with you to leverage your data, identify the inefficiencies and target spend in your current program in the following ways:

Actuarial services

  • Design for value through coverage provisions, network configuration, and engagement.

  • Manage health risk through a data-driven approach that promotes a healthy workforce through targeted interventions.

  • Drive efficiencies through smart financing and placement.

  • Risk analysis to forecast benefit spend under various scenarios to identify exposure to financial risk and recommend risk management solutions.

We can help you bend the curve with multi-pronged and multi-year strategies that provide the right level of cover for your employees at a cost that is sustainable for your business.

Financing solutions

For companies with a distributed global footprint and a strong balance sheet, using a captive to finance employee medical and risk benefits can potentially lead to lower and more predictable overall costs, improved employee coverage and faster access to comprehensive real-time data. 

Using a captive can also bring increased control over governance and design of employee benefits solutions, helping global companies to create a market leading benefits proposition that supports diversity, equity and inclusion within their workforce. 

For multinationals that do not wish to self-fund employee benefit risks, Mercer Marsh Benefits is able to create programs with global insurers that can reduce costs, enhance coverage, improve governance and maximize the value from your benefit spend.

Five governance and financial risks arising from benefits plans

Organizations are increasingly offering a wide range of benefits to employees, but poor plan design and rising costs can have significant impacts. Companies need to adopt a risk management approach to control and mitigate these threats — protecting their people, reputations and bottom lines.

Understanding financial and governance risks

70%

of HR and risk managers agree that governance and financial risks pose a serious threat to the business.

52%

say increasing health, risk protection, and well-being costs are likely, and 45% say these risks could have a catastrophic impact.

72%

of organizations are spending more on benefits per employee, while 60% are increasing investment in employee well-being.

Related solutions
Related insights